By Jessica Edwards
She arrived quietly last November, shrouded in blue shrink-wrapped
plastic and strapped to the bed of a tractor-trailer.
Only a few knew her name, fewer still of her extraordinary life at sea.
But the Felicity Ann, a 23-foot wooden sloop, the first boat sailed by a woman solo across
the Atlantic, arrived in Haines to a warm – if small – welcome.
Before she arrived, Felicity Ann’s new owner, Haines magistrate
John Hutchins, hired local wooden boat builders Ian Seward and John White to perform a
bottom-up restoration of the famous little vessel. Work started this week.
"It couldn’t be in a better place," said Hutchins, who
only recently learned of the need for a major overhaul. "There are people here who
care about it, who want to do the work and have the skills to do it."
Hutchins purchased the Felicity Ann after reading "My Ship Is So
Small," Ann Davison’s account of her solo voyage across the Atlantic.
"The boat was such a character in the book," Hutchison said.
"It’s more than a boat. It becomes a real person."
Davison set sail from England with the intent of crossing the Atlantic
in December of 1952, only four years after a shipwreck that killed her husband off the
Dorset Coast.
After the wreck, Davison purchased the Felicity Ann, which was built by
Mashfords Brothers, Ltd., in Cornwall. Davison describes how Felicity Ann buoyed her
through extreme weather, loneliness, hunger and fatigue on a six-month journey.
The reader is struck by the fact that even while Davison enjoyed the
camaraderie in port, she was inexorably drawn back aboard her craft and out to the
fearsome solitude of the sea. Even after reaching her goal by landing at Nassau, Davison
heads out again, this time for New York.
After reading Davison’s book, Hutchins felt compelled to visit the
Felicity Ann, which was for sale in Seward. "It’s neat, a person venturing off
and sailing the Atlantic all alone," he said. "It wasn’t something women
did at that time, venturing off on their own."
The boat’s previous owners, two Anchorage schoolteachers, had
restored the planking, metal work and deck over the course of 20 years. When one of the
women died of breast cancer, the other didn’t have the heart to keep a project the
two of them had worked together on so long.
Hutchins purchased the Felicity Ann, and had her trucked to Haines. He
hoped to get her into the water immediately, and asked woodworker Seward to have a look at
her.
When Seward arrived to check out the boat, he found she lacked an
engine and a bilge pump. But pumping the bilges revealed something much more troublesome:
Despite the care of previous owners, Felicity Ann had a rotten keel.
"I realized some of the gunk used to be wood," Seward said
about scraping out the bilge. The bottom half of the boat had been fiberglassed and where
the keel met vertical ribs, the glass had trapped condensation, rotting the tropical
hardwood at the boat’s heart.
Seward suspected the root cause was an original design flaw that left
Felicity Ann without floor timbers, the structural element linking the ribs to the keel.
"When the boat heels over, the seams open up," Seward said. "The leaking
prompted them to fiberglass that."
So how big a deal’s a rotten keel? A sailboat’s ballast, the
keel acts as a counter-weight to wind as it fills the sails, heeling the boat over and
allowing forward progress. Gone undiscovered, the compromised keel might have broken off
at sea, with catastrophic results.
Hutchins said he hadn’t counted on an expensive restoration –
the work will take several months for a couple of workers at about $50 an hour, plus
materials – but he was committed to getting the boat back into top shape while
retaining its original character.
"It has to be done and it’s a worthy thing to do."
Seward commended Hutchins on the goal of a museum quality restoration
for Felicity Ann. "It’s an incredibly cool project. It’s really amazing to
have an opportunity to work on it."
He said the first step was getting the boat into a shop owned by local
fisherman and veteran sailor John White. There, White and Seward will remove the
boat’s interior. Supporting the boat with the keel suspended, they’ll strip the
fiberglass patches and remove the keel.
This is a major undertaking, as a boat is built from the keel up.
Removing the keel means removing the boat’s "backbone"— the structural
element that gives all the timbers their shape.
To help keep Felicity Ann together, long planks are curved along each
side, and are braced at about a 45-degree angle to the floor. "Wood has a
memory," said White, adding that placing a new keel in the boat would reactivate the
wood’s memory.
The new keel will be fashioned from a tropical hardwood called Purple
Heart, which grows from Central Mexico south. "It’s heavy and rot
resistant," Seward said. There’s a chance the owner of Felicity Ann’s last
remaining sister ship has original plans for the boat, which would aid in designing and
constructing the new keel.
One major modification will be to add floor timbers connecting every
other rib to the keel. Seward said this would compensate for the original design flaw, and
binding "both halves of the ribs and the keel together." Much of the woodworking
will be done by hand.
Seward was hopeful the restorations could be completed in time to see
the boat in the water this summer.
Hutchins looks forward to taking Felicity Ann sailing, but also to
having her in the harbor where people can see her. He recently donated Davison’s book
to the public library.
"It would be nice for people to read the book and then look at
(Felicity Ann) and marvel at the fact that someone jumped into this little boat and sailed
across the ocean," said Hutchins. "It’s a big ocean."
He said he might eventually donate the boat to a museum or university
sailing program where there were substantial resources to maintain her. "Eventually,
she belongs somewhere where she can be an inspiration to people," Hutchins said.
"Somewhere a young girl can see her and say, ‘If Ann Davison could sail across
the ocean all by herself, I can do anything.’"
